Games like this in the ‘90s were mostly static, but the 3D environments of The Eyes of Ara are pure 21st century videogame immersion. Little dust clouds bloom wherever you click, for instance, adding a layer of connectivity to the world and the objects you see. They are grounded enough in human experience and problem solving that we can enjoy them no matter what form they come in.” Exploring the environment, discovering things both strange and wonderful, is genuinely fascinating, but aside from the storytelling and the puzzles, The Eyes of Ara has a number of smaller touches to appreciate too. It doesn’t matter whether you are solving these puzzles in a game, or on paper, or in an escape room, or even watching a character do it in a movie. I guess that’s part of what makes them universal. “I like to explore a real space and see how things fit together. Many of the puzzles are very mechanical in nature.“There’s something about these sorts of classical puzzles that I really enjoy, as opposed to more abstract, purely mental exercises,” Droste tells me. It has the sort of invisible guiding hand that you only realise was there after the fact, and it can be felt throughout the game. The puzzle design never feels too abstract to make any sense, or too overwhelming in the number of mysteries you need to try and piece together.

It’s all the more impressive given how accessible it is. And did I mention that Droste – who is an industry veteran with many years experience as an environmental artist – spearheaded just about every aspect of development? Yes, The Eyes of Ara was a one-man project… that admittedly took three years to complete. What are the blue lights throughout the castle?There’s a lot going on, in other words. It’s almost all incomplete information and sometimes even contradictory.” So all of the little bits of lore scattered around are designed to add to the overall story and history, but also give varying accounts of it. “One of the main themes of The Eyes of Ara,” says Droste, “is the untrustworthiness of incomplete information and the importance of seeking out the truth. Are they those mysterious blue lights floating around the place, seemingly sentient in the way they subtly point you to the next clue or mysterious device? The ambiguity of the clues and the gaps in what you uncover will only serve to add to your curiosity, and this was a clear design tool used throughout development. Like easing into a hot tub, once the game gets going you’ll be perfectly ready, loose, and limber to take on each new mystery.Īstronomy and astrological bodies are a running theme.The complexity ramps up considerably at this point with numerous puzzles to solve, environmental clues to find, and narrative bits and pieces to collect and read that will slowly form a picture of what exactly the mysterious castle was used for… and perhaps lead you on a path to figuring out what The Eyes of Ara actually are. It’s here you’ll realise that you were playing a tutorial, one that introduced the number of ways in which you can interact with the environment, via a number of fairly isolated puzzles. That feeling will quickly go away once the first of a handful of larger areas to explore opens up.

And if you fall into that category The Eyes of Ara may even seem disappointing in the early stages. Mind you, referring to these opening moments as surprisingly simple only applies to those of us who recall staring at a CRT monitor for hours on end while a newfangled CD-ROM drive did its magic to bring us a vivid and confusing multimedia world to explore.

And for those of us who generally aren’t very good at solving complex and multi-layered puzzles, it’s the sort of design that’ll make you feel clever. You might be stuck in a room, for instance, and need to poke and prod and logically experiment until you work out what you need to do to proceed. Wilfully obtuse puzzles are a relic of adventure games past.Instead of large areas to wander around in, then, the opening sections of The Eyes of Ara are made up of the sort of stuff you’d find in a classic Zelda game. “Games have come a long way since then and I wanted to incorporate modern design techniques and theory that has been painstakingly developed over the last few decades.”

“The obtuse design of those old games was something I specifically wanted to avoid,” Droste explains. This style of game is known for dropping the player into a confusing world in which simply finding your feet can take a while. The initial puzzles, for instance, come as a refreshing surprise for anyone familiar with the genre in its heyday, in that they’re fairly straightforward and intuitive to solve. Play It’s only informed by games like Myst, however, and this is clear from the opening moments.

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